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Location: Nashville, Tennessee, United States

10/29/2003

The Islamic Bomb
Forget the Marlins vs. the Yankees, says David Warren. The real world series will pit the West against an axis that revolves around a nuclear-armed Iran

My own assessment, from what Iranian sources I have directly and indirectly, is that the net effect of the Nobel Prize to Ms Ebadi is nil. The only thing that could make an immediate difference in Iran's domestic situation would be direct confrontation with the United States. Which is why so many Iranians - including the late Ayatollah Khomenei's own grandson, now speaking from safety in Shia Iraq - are begging for this.

They are likely to be disappointed. Faced with the near-certainty that Iran will soon become the first Middle Eastern power other than Israel with nuclear weapons - the perfect cover for increased Hizbollah operations throughout the region and the world - the Bush administration is behaving like France. Pressure for increased inspections of Iranian nuclear sites is being directed almost entirely through the United Nations. And the ayatollahs are being allowed to play a Saddam-like game, in which, as Thursday, they opened a few more centres to inspection by the IAEA, in order to take the wind out of an Oct. 31 deadline to open all.

Let me spell out what I hinted in the last paragraph. The immediate danger from a nuclear-armed Iran is not that they will pump a missile into Tel Aviv, as Ayatollah Rafsanjani has boasted in the past. They are not so crazy. The threat itself is sufficient to win concessions from any enemy; whereas acting on the threat would only bring Armageddon. A deployed nuclear arsenal instead provides its owner with the freedom to do anything else he wants, with near impunity. And that 'anything else' is likely to consist of using Hizbollah, and other Iranian-controlled terrorist assets, to rekindle the Islamic Revolution which Khomenei began, far beyond Iran's borders.
Read the whole chilling thing. And pray that, behind the scenes, the Bush administration is covertly doing that which needs to be done to remove the mullahs before they get nukes.